2016 is a stake-in-the-ground year in the age of the customer, a 20-year business cycle in which the most successful enterprises will reinvent themselves to systematically understand and serve increasingly powerful customers. Customer-obsessed leaders will see tangible business growth from their strategy shift, while laggards will spiral down the slow path of mediocrity. Firms’ insatiable … continue reading
More than half the data transferred to and from 500 popular Android applications was found to have little or no impact on user experience, according to a recent MIT study. “We looked at the communication of mobile applications and counted the number of statements in the application that establish these connections,” said Julia Rubin, a … continue reading
Perfecto Mobile, a provider of testing services for mobile application developers and QA, today announced a US$35 million investment that it will use to expand its products and build out its sales staff. The investment, from Technology Crossover Ventures, and from existing investors FTV Capital, Carmel Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners and Vertex Ventures, will help … continue reading
Developers want end users to engage with their applications, and a new way of trying to achieve that is having devices learn from the user and adjust accordingly. This capability has been seen in technologies such as Apple’s Siri, Google Now, IBM’s Watson, and Microsoft’s Project Adam, but has been mostly too complex and too … continue reading
Google is planning to bring its personal computer operating system, Chrome OS, to its mobile operating system, Android. According to the Wall Street Journal, the new operating system will be unveiled in 2017, but users can expect a preview of the early version by next year. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, recently told analysts that … continue reading
If you ran into an issue in a mobile application and knew there was an easy way to report it, would you? As a user, you might, or you might simply delete the app. For QA teams and users of company apps, though, it’s not a choice. They need their company’s application to run well. … continue reading
Perfecto Mobile’s newly launched solution, Wind Tunnel, allows developers to go “back to the future” by predicting how a mobile application will look before it is released into the market. Wind Tunnel is a new method of looking at functional testing, and it brings end users “into the lab,” so to speak, by offering developers … continue reading
Think of the words “simplicity, performance and usability.” They were key components of Leaflet, an open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. Leaflet was developed by Vladimir Agafonkin of MapBox, which is a building-block application that makes it easy to integrate location into mobile applications. The library weighs about 33KB of gzipped JavaScript code, and … continue reading
The series of Facebook outages, caused by planned software updates, at the end of last month caused an uproar for millions of its mobile users. The social networking site is trying to prevent the issue in the future by working on two other ways to improve connectivity. There are still users stuck on mobile 2G … continue reading
Steve Yegge recently posted a piece where he took to task his own predictions from 2004. I thought it would be fun to take a gander at some of the predictions pundits have made about programming over the years, and see just how wrong or right they were. If you’ve spent any time at all … continue reading
Ask any business leader if they’re OK relaxing their mobile security standards and they’ll quickly tell you it’s not an option. But as mobile apps transition from standalone experiences to integral parts of an overall physical/digital ecosystem, securing them becomes more complex and more dynamic—a job well beyond the duties of mobile app developers. Mobile … continue reading
IBM is launching new Bluemix services for developers. The new tools are designed to give developers an easy way to integrate data analytics and visualization into their cloud-based applications. IBM Streaming Analytics, now in open beta, provides a way for developers to visualize data. IBM dashDB, now generally available, enables information-management, analytics and business intelligence … continue reading
